


The sea in your heart and the stars in your eyes

by Jingting



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Injury Recovery, Language Barrier, Magic, Merpeople, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 18:11:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18899944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jingting/pseuds/Jingting
Summary: He loves the sea.He always has, which is part of why he’s here, now, at the crack of dawn, combing the beach for whatever trinkets the sea had brought ashore at night and hadn’t taken back in the morning.Little does he know, this morning the sea has brought him a gift that will change his life forever...





	The sea in your heart and the stars in your eyes

**Author's Note:**

> "But my wife, my love and my lady, is the sea."  
> \- Looking Glass
> 
> "One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea."  
> \- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
> 
> "For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it is always our self that we find in the sea."  
> \- E. E. Cummings
> 
> I was watching the "Brandy" scene from GotG Vol. 2 and this idea popped into my head. Since I've hit a bit of a snag with my main story, I thought, why not?  
> Can't believe I planned this at 3000 words. It's over double that. Oh well. Enjoy a whoppin' 7000 I guess, and let me know what you think.

He loves the sea.

He always has, which is part of why he’s here, now, at the crack of dawn, combing the beach for whatever trinkets the sea had brought ashore at night and hadn’t taken back in the morning. His room is cluttered with things others would consider worthless, rocks, shells, pieces of fishing net and other kinds of flotsam. Every once in a while he finds something with actual monetary worth, but that’s always confiscated the moment he brings it across the threshold to, as Mrs. Brown puts it, help pay for his room and board.

That is the other part of the reason that he is here. The home is crowded and noisy and sweaty, as will work be, later in the day. His wanderings on the beach are the only time and place where he can get some peace and quiet, with no one bothering him.

Little does he know, this morning the sea had brought him a gift that would change his life forever.

The first thing he notices is green. He is drawn to it like a fly to a light bulb. The color pallet of the beach is limited to greys, browns and yellows, and of course the blue of the everpresent sea. Green doesn’t belong here.

He walks towards it, all the while racking his brain about what it could be. He thinks about a clump of fresh seaweed, but just as he realizes seaweed is never this bright green, it _moves_.

He pauses. An injured animal, probably. From the size of it, he thinks a dolphin? But dolphins aren’t _green_.

He sets down the things he had found that day at a safe distance, then begins cautiously making his way over to it. A while ago, he had found a seagull with a broken wing. He had vastly underestimated the strength and ferocity of the injured bird, and although he had eventually managed to catch it and take it to the coastguard to be patched up, he still has scratches littering his arms to show for it and the frightened thing had come very close to pecking out an eye.

When he is a few meters away, he stops dead in his tracks. Pinches his arm very hard to make sure he is not dreaming or hallucinating. Then he rubs his eyes until they sting, because the sight before him is clearly not real.

The top is close to human, long bright green hair spread out on the sand, framing a beautiful pale face with a mouth, a nose, two closed eyes and two fin-like ears. A few small cyan scales, almost like freckles, adorn her cheeks and forehead. They increase in size and number down her back, finally replacing the skin completely when they reach–

He has to sit down, his legs feeling like jelly.

The lower part of the creature is formed by one single tapering cyan limb, gleaming in the early sun. It makes up about two-thirds of the overall body and ends in two fin-like flukes, like a whale’s. A line of spines with thin membrane in between runs from between her shoulders all the way to the tip of the tail. In her side, just under the ribcage, he can see three slits.

A mermaid. Hopelessly tangled in a fishing net, the ropes pinning her arms and tail at uncomfortable angles. They have cut into her skin and he can see red swirling where she’s half submerged in the water. He can see her gills working, but she seems unconscious. Small wonder, considering her current circumstances. He wonders how long she’s been lying like this. Judging from the fact that the part of her hair that’s spread out on the beach is dry and blowing in the wind, it must have been a while.

He finds himself at a loss of what to do. He could call for help, but finding a real, live mermaid would get him all sorts of attention that he would rather avoid, and, more importantly, it would land her in an aquarium to be poked at by scientists for the rest of her days. He doesn’t know anything about mermaids (who does?!), but if it were him, he knows what he’d choose.

So, there’s really nothing for it. He’s gonna have to take care of this himself. And quick, he realizes, because Mrs. Brown knows about his beachwalks. She allows them because they bring in a small amount of money, but he has to be back before breakfast.

Looking around, his gaze falls on a crack in the cliffside behind him. He has walked this beach countless times and he knows it like the back of his hand. He knows that beyond the narrow entrance, there is a shallow cave with a surprisingly large saltwater pool, fed by the ocean during high tide through little cracks underwater. He knows it’s deeper than you’d think at first glance, because he once brought a two-meter long stick to see if he could touch the bottom. He couldn’t.

It’ll be perfect to house his mermaid for the time being.

First though, he wants to try to get the fishing net off her, in order to better assess the damage done and decide what to do for it. He walks around her a few times, trying to figure out where best to start so he doesn’t make things worse. He decides to start with one of the thicker parts, hoping that if he cuts it, he’ll be able to get some of it off.

He puts a hand on her hip (or rather, where the hip would be on a human), pulls out a pocket knife and begins sawing as carefully as he can. It’s slow going, and despite his care, the rough rope rubs against the sensitive skin, opening the wound again.

He’s halfway through when his ears are pierced by a blood-curdling screech and the shiny scales twist out from under his hands. He looks up to see the mermaid thrashing furiously, flopping about in the shallow water. She is weak though, and after a few more seconds, she stops, her gills heaving and her face towards him. For the first time, he can see her eyes.

They are…unnerving. Her eyes are black, the iris and pupil indistinguishable. He notices, faintly, that she doesn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows, and then his focus is pulled down, towards her mouth. It’s open, and she is displaying an impressive amount of sharp-looking teeth. When he makes to get up, she hisses up a storm and he realizes, belatedly, that he must look very threatening with his knife raised like that, its edge red with her blood.

He fumbles the knife back into his pocket and raises his hands in a placating manner. “Easy, I’m not gonna hurt you.”

The snarl does not disappear. He wonders if she can even understand him.

“Um…” He doesn’t know how to convince her he’s trying to help her, and judging from the situation she’s in he doubts she has had very good experiences with humans, but he thinks she might be hungry. He found some clams earlier, and while he doesn’t know what mermaids eat exactly, he is fairly sure she isn’t a vegetarian.

Holding his palms out to her, he carefully walks backwards, towards the pile of stuff he found this morning. He digs out the clams, keeping one eye on her all the while to make sure she doesn’t make a break for the ocean. He’s very certain she won’t survive out there.

He returns with four clams, holding them out as he approaches her to make sure she can see them. Now her gaze is focused on his hands instead of his face, and she slowly closes her mouth. He kneels in the water a respectable distance away, and she watches with interest as he peels open the shell and takes out the mollusk.

He’s not at all comfortable bringing his hand within reach of her sharp teeth, but she certainly can’t feed herself right now and he hopes she’s more interested in seafood than in human fingers. He stops at a few centimeters from her face and she pauses for a moment, apparently making up her mind before leaning forward a little bit to very carefully pluck the mollusk from his hand. It’s gone within seconds.

He lets out the breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Okay.” Keeping eye contact the whole time, making sure she can see what he’s doing, he puts his hand back on her hip. She tenses, so he gives her the second mollusk to make sure she stays still. He begins sawing again.

It takes him a few minutes to cut the rope and he can tell she’s fighting the urge to pull away, but she doesn’t move, just lying there quietly and observing his actions. When he finally has the rope through, he slowly peels it off her. It has cut deep and she hisses and squirms as he gently pulls it out of the wounds, blood staining the water. It enforces his belief that she’ll have to stay here for a while to heal. He only hopes he can convince her of that necessity as well.

The next rope he cuts frees her arms, and as soon as they’re loose she lunges for the two clams he had left. They’re gone down her throat before he can blink. He had been hoping to use them as leverage to persuade her to stay, but it looks like that option has vanished. He has to smile when he sees the smugness in her eyes, instantly hoping she doesn’t interpret that as him baring his teeth at her.

In order to get the net off, he has to cut a number of thin wires and he has to stick his knife into the wounds to cut them. She lets him, shaking slightly, but hisses and puts her hand on one wire when he approaches it. On closer inspection, it’s not part of the net, but a necklace with a pretty aqua-colored shark eye shell hanging from it. He avoids that particular string and focuses on the rest. Her hair is tangled around it and he does his best to pry it loose without pulling too much. Then he can finally pull the fishing net off completely and throw it onto the beach.

She’s supporting her weight on her elbows by now and, once she sees the fishing net fly, immediately begins turning around and attempting to crawl back into the ocean. He quickly splashes deeper into the water, positioning himself between her and the horizon. “Hey, wait! You can’t go back right now, you won’t make it!”

She looks at him, teeth bared, and makes a clicking noise, like a dolphin. She definitely doesn’t understand a thing he’s saying. So he points at an especially deep wound instead and at the red water surrounding her, hoping she reaches the conclusion herself.

She takes her time checking herself over, then hesitantly raises a webbed hand. He notices, with an uncomfortable jolt, that she has sharp claws instead of nails. She points at the horizon, though it seems to him she’s seeking affirmation rather than an answer. He shakes his head fervently, even adding “No!” for good measure, and points over her at the cave. She turns her head to look at the unimpressive crack in the wall, then back at him. She splashes her hand in the water and points at the cave herself. He nods, leaning forward to cup a bit of water in his hands and then point at the cave again, hoping they’re understanding each other.

Apparently so, because she looks back and forth between the cave and the horizon a few times, snaps her teeth together and turns again, this time crawling out of the water and onto the beach. He winces as he notices the bloody trail she’s leaving and at how he imagines the rough sand must feel against the wounds, and hurries out of the water to help.

Seeing as she’s over three meters from head to tail, he can’t possibly carry her. So after checking that she’s not going to swipe at him with those unnervingly long claws, he hooks his hands under her armpits, trying very hard not to touch her small breasts, and drags her across the sand. It takes him at least five minutes to cross the fifteen meters and when he finally lets her down at the edge of the pool, she slides into the water without a sign of thanks and dives under. He wants to check her injuries and maybe disinfect things, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to come up again anytime soon and he doubts he can communicate that it will hurt before making things better.

Breathing heavily and feeling sweat run down his back, he squints at the dark water. The only source of light in the cave is the entrance, and the sun is too high to illuminate the cave’s insides properly. He needs to get back quick, but he wants to make sure she stays here. The beach is not busy, particularly not at this time of year, but only a glimpse could expose her.

“You have to stay in here, okay?” he shouts at her. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

There is no reaction whatsoever from the water.

~~*~~

He shoves all the bloody sand into the water, trusting the ocean to hide the evidence. Then he washes the fishing net and takes it home along with the rest of his knickknacks, as proof for himself that this wasn’t all just a dream.

He receives a scolding for being so late and, after determining he brought only ‘worthless junk’ back this time, Mrs. Brown confines him to his room for the rest of the day, except to go out for work.

~~*~~

During the day, as he’s working and attempting to ignore his rumbling stomach, he wonders if there is anything for her to eat in that pool.

During dinner, as he picks at his food despite missing breakfast, he wonders if she’ll be all right. He doesn’t know anything about mermaid complexion, but hers had been very pale and she had lost a lot of blood.

During the evening, as he sits alone in his room, running the fishing net through his hands, he wonders how intelligent she is. Does she have a name? A family, waiting for her to come back?

During the night, as he tosses and turns and listens to the other boy’s snoring, he wonders if she’s even still there, or if she’s decided to take her chances out in the open ocean.

He tries to sleep, until he finally decides it’s useless and gets up to sneak out. He tiptoes through the silent house. If Mrs. Brown finds him awake and about at night, he can forget all about his mermaid because she’ll lock his door and ground him for a month. Nonetheless, he’s done this before, and he makes it out of the house and to the beach without any trouble

~~*~~

When he reaches the cave, he calls out hesitantly: “Are you still here?”

There’s silence for a moment. Then he hears a splash and feels water hitting his legs. He laughs in relief.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” he says. “I’ll bring you something to eat, too.”

The next splash drenches him from head to toe. He gets the hint and leaves. By the time he reaches the home, he’s shivering. He slips gratefully into his bed and falls asleep immediately.

~~*~~

He makes it out of the house before Mrs. Brown can forbid him to go. When he reaches the cave, the sun is just up and shining directly onto the water. He can see a green and cyan blur lying on the bottom. He can’t tell if she is asleep, but he suspects not.

When he throws one of the fishes he nicked from the kitchen into the water, it takes a while before he sees her moving upwards. One cyan-spotted hand reaches up and pulls the fish down from where it’s floating belly-up on the water.

After a few minutes, he sees her rising to the surface. She comes up on the far side of the pool, as far away from him as possible and only allows her eyes above the water. Her green hair fans out across the water, surrounding her as she peers at him with distrust in her eyes.

He holds out a second fish.

Her eyes narrow, before slowly making her way across the pool towards him. He notes she’s not trailing blood anymore, but he can’t tell if she’s moving this slowly because she’s scared of him or because she’s hurting. Probably both.

She stops at a safe distance and stretches out her hand. Once her fingers close around the fish, he lets go. She pulls it towards her and meets his eyes. For a moment, it looks as if she wants to bolt again, but instead she slowly retreats to the middle of the pool, where she stays at the surface with lazy flicks of her tail.

While she eats, they observe each other. He tries not to make any sudden moves and notices she must have taken care of her hair, because it looks nowhere as tangled and dirty as it did yesterday.

The next fish has a pill of paracetamol slipped into it from the medkit he brought as well. He doesn’t know if it will be enough to help with the pain, but he doesn’t dare give her anything stronger because there’s no telling how her body might react to it. They repeat the same procedure of him holding out the fish and her slowly coming towards him to take it before swimming to the middle of the pool again.

He stops when he has two fish left. She’s eaten five, so he suspects her belly is full enough for the time being. They stare at each other, he on the shore and she in the middle of the pool. He wants to check her wounds, but doesn’t know how to convince her to let him. He thinks they should probably establish some kind of communication.

He sits back, points at himself and says his name. Then he points at her.

She tilts her head at him and responds with a cacophony of clicks and screeches that echoes around the cave and has him fighting the urge to press his hands against his ears. He grimaces when she closes her mouth and looks at him expectantly. This isn’t going to work.

He tries something else. He holds out his right hand, palm towards her, and waits.

She comes to investigate. She sniffs at his fingers, before hesitantly raising her left hand and slowly pressing her hand against his.

The contrast is jarring. Her hand is cold where his is warm, rough where his is smooth, her claws pointed where his nails are round. And yet, despite all the difference, they are very similar too.

He lets the contact hold for a few more seconds. Then he carefully brings out his other hand and moves it up her arm. She tenses, but lets him. When he reaches the first wound, on her lower arm, she hisses and begins to pull away, so he removes his hand and focuses on keeping his right pressed against hers. She looks at them, settles again and allows him to continue his ministrations.

This way, he carefully checks over all her wounds. All of them have stopped bleeding, and there seem to be no signs of infection. That’s all he can do for now. He even gets her to lift her tail out of the water and onto the shore under the guise of checking it too, and runs his hand appreciatively up and down an unmarred patch. The scales are so smooth he can move both ways without his hand catching on the edges.

He talks to her, too. At first only a shushing noise that he catches himself making as he checks a particularly deep wound across her collarbone. But then he just starts telling her what he’s doing. He knows babies learn to speak by absorbing their mother’s words and eventually parroting them back in order to make their wishes clear. He doubts they’ll ever get to that point, but he thinks even one-sided communication will be useful in this endeavor.

She objects only once during this entire operation, namely when he tries to get a look at the shell hanging around her neck. She puts her free hand over it protectively and hisses sharply. He pulls his hand away and looks at their joint hands again. They seem to do the trick in calming her down. Maybe it’s a mermaid thing?

When he’s done, it’s almost time to go back. He can’t be late again or he’ll be in trouble with Mrs. Brown. So, he gives her the last two fish and gets up to leave, saying “Bye!” and waving his hand. Her black eyes follow him as he goes, and the moment he clears the cave he hears a splash and knows she’s dived under to finish her meal.

~~*~~

As he eats breakfast, he resolves that he’ll give her a name, if only because he can’t keep calling her ‘mermaid’. She probably won’t mind, but it’ll sound rude to his ears.

During the day, as he works, he mulls over the options. At first, he thinks of something water-related, like Moana or Sirena, but during dinner he settles on Sarah.

It was his mother’s name, and the only thing he has of her, along with some blurry images in his mind that he doesn’t even know are real or just imaginations. It’ll come naturally to his lips.

~~*~~

He goes to visit her at night again, this time not so much to make sure she’s still there but more to make sure she’s all right. He takes a flashlight with him because he knows it’ll be dark inside the cave. He doesn’t know how good her night vision is, but his is terrible.

He finds her the same as before, curled up at the bottom of the pool. When he shines the flashlight on her, she shies away from the beam and swims towards the back of the cave. Quickly, he points the flashlight on the back wall, so he can still see her but she’s not blinded by it.

She comes up to produce a disgruntled shriek. When he calls “Sarah,” she squints at him and slowly makes her way over, perhaps hoping for more fish. He’s sorry to disappoint her. Sneaking out of the house is one thing, but taking a detour to the kitchen is pretty much impossible without waking someone. 

She doesn’t seem too deterred. After determining there’s no food, she waits at a safe distance to see what he’s going to do.

He puts the flashlight down in a way that it gives enough light for them to see each other. Then he holds his hand out, to see if she’ll press hers to it again. She does. He settles down beside her with one arm around his knees.

She doesn’t seem to object to his company as much as she did the other night. Maybe she’s lonely, he thinks. He knows dolphins live in pods made up of family members. Does she have a family out there that’s calling for her? Does she have a mate, maybe even young? He tries to guess how old she is, but her features are so alien he finds it impossible to put an age on her. How old do mermaids get anyway?

His musings are interrupted by a small splash to his side. She raises her right hand from the water while still holding her left hand pressed to his and puts it on his ankle. He feels an involuntary shiver run down his spine at how cold her hand is.

She feels out his entire lower leg, apparently fascinated by the lack of scales. He removes his shoe in amusement, earning himself an excited chitter when she catches sight of his toes. He lets her inspect them, only stopping her when she tries to bend one of his toes the wrong way. When she pokes at the soft underside of his foot however, he can’t hold back a chuckle, causing her to abruptly let go and look up at him in alarm.

“It’s okay,” he smiles, pressing his hand against hers again and guiding his foot within her reach. “You tickled me, that’s all.”

She looks at him in doubt, but then moves forward to poke his foot again, this time with her eyes trained on his face. When he smiles again, she scrunches up her face, peeling back her lips to reveal her own teeth and pulling up the corners of her mouth. It doesn’t look exactly friendly, considering she has far sharper teeth than humans do, but he smiles at her effort anyway.

She abandons his feet in favor of his face. She pulls at his ears and peers into his nose. She mostly leaves his eyes alone, only tracing the arch of his eyebrow with her finger. When she touches a finger to his lips, he opens his mouth and she looks inside. She moves her finger over his tongue and comparatively blunt teeth, but fortunately doesn’t try to push it down his throat.

Her human half is almost fully out of the water at this point, and he blushes as he realizes her front is leaning against his chest. She pokes at his cheeks, undoubtedly confused by the sudden scarlet there.

He’s suddenly quite aware of how close they are, and hooks his hands under her armpits to gently push her back into the water. She goes without complaint, dropping so only her eyes are still above the surface and opening her mouth to suck in water. He can see her gills working. Looks like she can hold her breath for a while. He wonders for how long, but doesn’t know how to ask.

She must have seen him looking at her gills. She clicks and rolls onto her side, holding onto the shore with her hands and swaying her tail lazily to stay at the surface. He carefully reaches out and touches her gills. When she doesn’t protest, he gently lifts one flap to look underneath. It looks pretty much the same as it does on a fish, except bigger. With regular intervals, water comes gushing out over his hand.

He moves lower, just as curious about her as she is about him. As he strokes down her tail, he comes upon a ridge he didn’t notice before. Lifting it reveals a triangular fin, sticking out from her tail. A bit lower, he finds another, slightly smaller one. He suspects she has them on the other side as well, and he wonders what they’re for. He doubts they’re for swimming, since he hasn’t seen her use them before. Maybe they’re for attracting a mate? The thought has him dropping the fin quite abruptly.

Recognizing he’s done, she slowly turns herself vertical once more, and this time she’s the one raising her hand. He presses his to hers, and she smiles that terrifying smile again before breaking contact and sinking below the water. She dives to the bottom and curls up on her usual spot.

He picks up the flashlight, says “Bye, Sarah,” and walks out.

~~*~~

The next morning, he grabs a couple of fish and heads down to the beach just as the sun is coming up. When he calls “Good morning, Sarah!” she comes up to meet him right away. They greet each other by pressing their hands together and he gives her a fish. She backs up a little bit, but not as far as before. She’s also swimming better than she was yesterday. Whether that’s because she’s healing or because of the painkiller, he doesn’t know, but she hasn’t had any adverse effects as far as he can see so he slips a pill into the second fish he gives her.

He checks her wounds the same way he did yesterday. He establishes that some of the smaller ones have already closed, and although the largest ones may scar, she looks overall a lot better than she did when he found her.

She’s also a lot more lively, splashing around the pool and drenching him so thoroughly he has to leave early for the wind to blow his clothes dry before he has to explain why he went for a fully-clothed swim at five in the morning. He also has to comb the beach again, because he almost always brings something back and returning empty-handed for two days in a row might arouse suspicion. He finds a number of pretty shells. Mrs. Brown confiscates them as soon as she sees them.

~~*~~

It’s Sunday, which means a day off work. After church, he would usually hang around town for the rest of the day, but this time he goes to the library. He borrows a number of books, two for children to learn words, a few about marine life with lots of pictures and some others. The librarian gives him a funny look, but says nothing.

He also goes into town to buy a lantern. It’ll be more practical than a flashlight, and something tells him he’s going to make a lot of midnight trips to the beach in the near future.

~~*~~

He spends the entire afternoon with his new mermaid friend, whom he introduces to books. He starts with the children’s books, not bothering with household items like chairs or forks, but spending plenty of time with daily sayings like “Good morning” or “Are you okay?”. He doesn’t dawdle too long on family relations, a painful topic for him, but he does ask her what she has. At “Family?” she nods, just like at “Mother?” and “Father?”, but when he asks “Partner?” and “Child?” she shakes her head.

This gives him a funny, but not unpleasant feeling in his stomach.

From there they effortlessly move on to the books about the sea, and those are greeted with unprecedented enthusiasm. She points at every illustration, clicking and chittering happily every time he turns a page. He doesn’t have the faintest clue what she’s going on about, but he’s fine with letting her prattle on.

She remembers quite a lot too, he notices when he points at her stomach and asks: “Are you hungry?” which is one of the phrases he showed her earlier. She nods enthusiastically, grabs a book before he can stop her, flips a few pages and points to a crab he recognizes, because he’s seen them crawling along on the beach every now and then. He flinches at the thought of having to catch a crab, but he doesn’t want her to be hungry.

And the ecstatic look on her face when he reenters the cave sporting a few scratches but also holding a wiggling crab is more than enough to make up for it.

~~*~~

The days go by in a haze. He visits her every night, then he goes back to get a few hours sleep and returns in the morning. The lack of sleep is becoming visible, but he knows Mrs. Brown won’t say anything as long as he does his work and doesn’t fall asleep during the day. It’s breaking him up, but Sarah is worth it.

She’s constantly in his thoughts, even when he’s not with her. Thinking about her gives him a warm feeling in his stomach, and it helps him pass the time he can’t spend with her.

He tells himself that the reason he spends so much time with her is just that she’s lonely, desperate for companionship, but deep inside he knows that he enjoys her company just as much, perhaps even more, and he treasures every hour they have together.

Communication remains tricky. They don’t have the vocal cords to make each other’s sounds, and he can’t tell exactly how much she can understand his language. She responds to him when he calls her Sarah, and she greets him with a particularly horrendous screeching noise that he suspects is her name for him every time he comes to visit. It makes him drop whatever he’s holding and plug his ears. He is fairly certain she does it on purpose.

He always does the talking. Sometimes he tells her about how much he misses his mother, and how much he wants to have a loving family instead of a stern headmistress and a lot of noisy and annoying siblings. Then she hangs onto the edge of the pool with her chin on her crossed arms, and makes a soft cooing noise every now and then. He doesn’t know if the sound is a reaction to what he’s telling her or to the tears welling up in his eyes.

Other times, she floats belly-up in the middle of the pool, lazily waving her arms through the water and swaying her dorsal fin from side to side to stay at the surface as he reads her from one of the books he’s brought from his many visits to the library. He doesn’t know if she’s really listening to the story of if she just likes the sound of his voice, but she’s hanging onto his every word nonetheless.

~~*~~

Her wounds are almost healed, and he’s been noticing a strange phenomenon. Whether it’s ebb or flow, a strangely small part of the sea keeps creeping further onto the beach, a blue finger reaching out to the opening of the cave.

When he finally understands what it means, the dream that he’s been living in shatters. She doesn’t belong here. As much as he wants to, it wouldn’t be fair of him to ask her to stay. She belongs in the deep blue ocean, not in a cramped puddle in a dark cave.

The day he sees the waves lapping at the mouth of the cave is the day he knows she will leave him.

The sea is calling its daughter home.

~~*~~

That night, he takes her stargazing.

It’s a beautiful, cloudless night, and away from the lights of the town, he can see countless stars shining in the sky. He spreads a blanket out on the beach and drags her out of the cave. He sees the wonder in her eyes as he lays her down on the blanket and joins her. He wonders if she’s ever seen he stars before, though he has to admit that even he has never seen this many.

The stars are shining so brightly that he can read without having to light his lantern. He has brought a book about constellations. He looks up which are visible here and now, and draws them out in the sand for them to find. Then he tells her the stories the ancient Greeks made up to explain them.

He points out the W-shape of Cassiopeia, and her husband Cepheus and daughter Andromeda close by, and tells her how the sea god Poseidon put them in the sky after Cassiopeia’s boast that she and her daughter were more beautiful than sea nymphs.

He shows her Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the Great Bear and the Small Bear, and tells her the story of Callisto, who was desired by the thunder god Zeus and bore him a son, Arcas. She was turned into a bear by his jealous wife Hera, who then tricked her son into hunting down and killing his own mother. To avoid this unknowing matricide, Zeus lifted them out of time and set them amongst the stars.

He tells her of the paradox created by Canis Major, the hunting dog Laelaps who caught whatever he chased, and Canis Minor, the Teumessian fox who could never be caught. As he’s describing how Zeus turned both animals to stone to solve the conundrum, he looks at her and his voice trails away.

She is looking at him now instead of upwards, and he sees all the stars of the night sky reflected in those ink-black eyes.

It feels like the most natural thing in the world to lean forward and press his lips to hers.

 

She’s cold, and the lack of breath makes it feel like he’s kissing a dead thing. But when he opens his eyes, he can see the entire galaxy and more pooled inside those ocean eyes.

 

Hours later, when he slips into bed and closes his eyes, he can still see starry eyes twinkling back at him.

~~*~~

The next morning, he holds on to the blissful feeling of last night for a few seconds before reality comes crashing down on him and he has to choke back a sob.

Today is the day she leaves him.

For the first time in his life, he has to force himself to get out of bed and make his way down to the beach. She’s waiting for him. The pool is flowing over, fed by the slab of water now connecting it to the sea.

He sloshes through the puddle and sits down next to her. He hasn’t cried since he was five years old and he understood that his mother would never come get him, but he can’t stop the tears flowing down his cheeks now.

“Sarah, I –“ he breaks off, trying to compose himself. “I’m…really going to miss you. I – You are the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’ll never forget you.”

She looks at him with those beautiful eyes (how could he ever have thought them unnerving?) and holds her hand up. He presses his palm to hers, feeling the cold. Somehow it gives him the strength to continue. He doesn’t know if she will understand, but he has to tell her.

“Sarah, last night… I don’t know how it is with mermaids, but when two humans kiss…it means they love each other. Do you know what love is? It means you want to spend the rest of your lives together, and never be apart. I don’t know if you have anything like it in the ocean, but… Sarah… I love you. I do. I think I always will.”

He hears her make a soft sound and he feels hope flaming up inside his heart. He looks at her.

But she’s not looking at him anymore. She’s looking at the ocean. He feels his heart breaking.

“Right,” he says, sniffling. “Let’s get you back.”

~~*~~

It takes far less effort than the first time he dragged her across this beach. He only has to get her out of the cave, because as soon as her tail hits the blue carpet the sea has rolled out for her, she squirms to be set down. He lowers her into the water and watches her hoist herself up and crawl forward. It’s slow going at first, but the deeper she gets, the easier it becomes. She becomes less defined the further she goes, but then he realizes it’s his own tears blurring his vision.

When she’s deep enough to use her tail instead of her hands to swim, she turns back to him. She holds out her hand, and waits.

He wades out to her. His shoes are sloshing and his clothes are getting soaked, but he doesn’t care. He presses his palm to hers, thinking this is her way of saying goodbye, but is surprised when she wraps her fingers around his and tugs.

She wants him to follow her into the water. Distantly, he wonders if she knows humans can’t breathe underwater, but he can’t bring himself to really care. Drowned by the one he loves doesn’t sound like such a bad way to die. He wades deeper, until his clothing is soaked and the sand is gone underneath his feet and he’s treading water. She lets go of his hand to pull at something he can’t see, and then she shows him the shell in the palm of her hand.

Her shell. The aqua-colored, spiraling shell he was never allowed to touch. It’s clearly important to her, and yet it seems she wants him to take it. He takes the shell and clenches it tightly.

Her head disappears underwater. He takes a gulp of air and follows for one last look.

She’s beautiful. Her head surrounded by a bright green halo, and cyan scales littering her body all the way down to her long, shimmering tail. He knows he’ll always remember her like this, the last time he sees her.

Then she suddenly veers forward. She puts one hand on the back of his head and pulls him into a passionate kiss. With the other hand, she presses his fist harshly against his chest, crushing the shell against his heart.

Salt water is burning its way into his lungs, but he fights down the instinctual urge to rush to the surface for air, because if he dies now her eyes will be the last thing he sees.

Then he feels the weirdest sensation of his life, like his body is reshaping itself.

He takes in a gulp of water in surprise, but suddenly it doesn’t hurt anymore. He feels ocean coursing through his chest and new fins swirling through the water, but his world is condensed to a voice that he knows and doesn’t know.

“I love you too.”

~~*~~

They never find him.

When he doesn’t show up for breakfast, they go looking for him down on the beach. By then, the sea has retreated, taking with it everything that could possibly hint at the truth.

He is given up as a victim of the sea. Slipped, fell, hit his head, drowned, swept away by the current.

His room is given to another orphan, the flotsam he had collected over the years thrown out with the trash.

Over time, he is forgotten.

But far away, in the blue depths of the ocean, lives a pod of merfolk, ever unseen by human eyes.

Among them lives a boy, who was born human but isn’t anymore, with his green-haired, cyan-tailed mate.

They love each other.

And the sea.


End file.
